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Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side

2009-11-11T22:19:22Z

Wow. A friend (thanks, Ron) sent me today his collection of social media job descriptions that are popping up across the web as more and more companies jump on board the hype train.

Needless to say, many of them are underwhelming. Alarming at worst, eliciting a sigh at best. And I actually think the poorly crafted job descriptions and even more poorly considered staffing needs are indicative of bigger, more strategic problems that some companies have really examining a) where they’re headed and b) what they need to get there. But that for another post.

Rather than turn this post into a useless rant about how “people” don’t “get” how to look at hiring social media folks, let’s look at some real examples of these job descriptions. Today, we’ll look at the missteps. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the more promising ones, and the underpinnings that show them headed in the right direction.

Misstep #1: Heavy focus on Tools

Take a look at these elements of some current job postings:

“Do you Tweet? Have you taken nearly every quiz that Facebook has to offer? Do you strive to create a massive LinkedIn network? If so, then read on!”

I’m looking to hire someone long-term to bolster a site’s presence on Twitter. This is for a successful online commodities and futures newsletter. Your job will be to advise on Twitter strategy and to put that strategy into action to increase the site’s follower count. You will have complete responsibility for our Twitter stream.

Technology is not the leading focus for social media. It’s the use of the technology to further a deeper (and more important) business goal. It shouldn’t be product manager job (the first job description had the word “product” in it 11 times), since the importance is in the use and intent of the technology. Not the thing itself.

Misstep #2: Assuming that “anyone” can do this job (and for cheap)

I’m all about hiring interns, junior staff, and giving up and comers an opportunity to demonstrate what they’re capable of. It’s awesome to have junior folks involved in social media. But putting the entirety of social in their hands? Or thinking that it’s a one and done expense? Both of those approaches imply that social media doesn’t belong among and within several areas of the business (both horizontally and vertically), which is how it makes the most impact.

In the first example, I’m not quite sure you can find a remote worker for $10/hour that really and truly understands the strategic integration of social media across the board. Call me crazy.

Seeking a smart and experienced professional to serve as Social Media Specialist. Understand the integration of social media from a marketing, customer care and public relations perspective. $10-$12/hour. Telecommuting job.

Social Media Project – Stage 2: Seeking social media expert to draft strategy for how to drive revenues for executive education program. (budget: less than $500)

Misstep #3: Neglecting Engagement

In my research, I saw several job descriptions (most, frankly) that focused heavily on how social media benefitted or could impact the company and their aims to be better known. They were largely focused on tactics and tools, and few actually referenced anything from the perspective of the customer, or the notion of engagement and connection with them.

That speaks to me of a wide misunderstanding of what social media is intended to do (or its potential), and a continued focus on “channels” of communication instead of philosophies that open doors to the customers themselves. As an example, read this job description for a community manager for a game company, and note the one (one!) bullet that talks about the community itself :

Responsibilities:

Oversee the design and implementation of social networking features, activities, and events within the online XXX community

Develop the monetization strategy for the community’s micro-transactions, subscriptions, virtual goods, events, user-generated content stores, etc.

Collaborate with XX design team to incorporate captivating social networking features into design templates

Produce blog updates, podcasts, videos, online posts, and newsletters to promote the community, featured members, new content, etc.

Establish an implementation strategy for 3rd party content that will enrich the overall user experience and keep the community fresh for frequent visitors

Integrate features that synch with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking Websites

Requirements:

Leadership experience with the strategic planning and marketing of at least one successful online community

Proven ability to create and execute online social media campaigns with growth from zero to 500,000 unique views within a 30 day period and more as time goes on in a viral fashion

Achievement of simultaneous and prominent placement on leading social news sites including: Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, Shoutwire, Sphinn and Technorati

Expertise publishing or participating on blogs, social news, video/photo sharing, social networking applications, widgets / gadgets, viral marketing campaigns, and podcasts

Experience implementing online monetization models and a strong familiarity of leading eCommerce systems and potential co-marketing partners

Ability to quantitatively assess Web analytics and data to adapt creative and business objectives in response to market feedback and user activity trends

Comfortable working in a lean, start-up environment where thinking ‘out of the box’ is strongly encouraged

Misstep #4: Thinking Content is Inherently Valuable

The content is just the vehicle. The end game is in closing the communication and relationship gap between your company and the people that drive it (your customers, donors, clients, members, vendors, employees, etc), and great, valuable content is one way to get there (and that “value” is in the eye of the beholder). But there are tons of job descriptions that go heavy on the content production and distribution, but with little discussion about why that content is what’s needed for customers (or, rather, if). Cases in point:

Our company is looking for a social media manager. The ideal candidate must be able to research the internet to find new, relevant and legitimate content to be posted to various social media profiles (i.e. Twitter and Facebook). We are seeking unique content to fill a full week (approx. 70 Twitter posts). Process: 1. Research the web for content and submit content for approval. 2. Upon approval, break content down into segments of 120 characters or less. 3. Schedule messages to be sent via our HootSuite account http://www.hootsuite.com.

Or this one:

This position will lead XXX on line content and messaging from an overall strategic level. As our primary messaging face to the on line community our goal is provide appropriate content that reflects the [company's] brand positioning. Working with the Brand Managers and Creative team to ensure that all online content, promotions, messaging etc., are in line with the strategy. Work closely with Information Management to ensure that content management programs fit within the appropriate architecture. Ensure the appropriate legal approvals have been realized. Work closely with Director of Communication to ensure that we are sending the appropriate message to our online community. Support additional on line marketing messages as appropriate.

Misstep #5: Making Social Synonymous with Traffic or Lead Generation

Social media success is not equal to website traffic. Nor is it (solely) reflected in lead generation numbers. It’s part of a business model for better customer relationships across the board. But yet, we see lots of job descriptions with elements like these:

We are looking for a social media and link building (SEO) talent. This person must be a self-starter, and is expected to work full-time on many, varied and exciting projects. We will ask you for examples of work and success. Key Responsibilities:

Work from existing research and link analysis, and build your own

Help to structure link building and social media work around keywords (emphasis mine)

Daily team updates

Develop comprehensive linking strategies and offer ongoing solutions

Track and monitor success via lists and ranking reports

Investigate and implement new technologies, services as needed

Or:

Own Social Media, interact with outside Online Communities, Blogs, Message Boards, Email Discussion Groups and Live Chats to generate exposure, publicity and traffic. Be passionately in tune with latest social media developments, online behavior and trends. Identify opportunities and develop plans/proposals for implementing scalable social media programs to generate maximum social media optimization. (emphases mine)

Or even:

Research and explore emerging online media to increase the effectiveness of marketing, advertising and promotional campaigns

Design, implement and monitor innovative online lead conversion methods for the sales team

Analyze campaign data and metrics to make appropriate adjustments and ensure maximum ROI

Ensure that all online branding and lead generation decisions ultimately support strategic business and revenue goals

Increase the sophistication and effectiveness of the company’s web-presence

Some Conclusions and More Questions

Based on all the reading I did and evaluation of some of these job descriptions, there is one key thing that jumped out at me, over and over: Companies still don’t know why they need or want social media.

This is partially due to the nascence of the industry, partly due to the need for more and better education on tool-agnostic social media strategy (h/t Jay Baer), and partly due to our pervasive human desire for the latest and greatest shortcut to awesomeness. Companies are in a big, fat hurry to put social media in the mix, but they’re looking at it tactically, not strategically. Throw a person at it, and check it off the list.

We also still clearly think of social firmly (and solely?) in the promotions-marketing-advertising-”get seen”-”it’s all about us” category. To me that means you and I have more work to do on the education and demonstration front. Of the nearly 50+ job descriptions I reviewed, a scant six of them even tangentially mentioned the customer or community member experience as a goal for social media. Of those, only two referenced prior customer service experience of any kind as a qualification or a helpful attribute.

There are some companies that are showing promising things in this realm and I’ll cover some of them tomorrow. And I realize, too, that I’m looking at functional job descriptions that may not accurately display the intent or the culture behind the hiring. But I suppose my question then: if I can’t discern the attitude and approach to social media when it’s the focus of the role (and recruiting for it), where, exactly, should I look to find that?

Your Turn

What does all of this say to you? How can we help correct some of these missteps? Job seekers and those of you with aspirations to work in social media, how would you write a job description for the role you think companies need? If you’re a consultant, how are you advising your clients to look at hiring for roles that include social media?

Share your insights, questions, experiences, ideas for solutions in the comments. (Oh, and if you have friends who can weigh in but haven’t stumbled across this lil’ blog yet, send them over?)

Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side

7 Apps We're Falling in Love With

2009-11-11T20:03:03Z

We test a lot of software around here, on the web, on our desktop and on our phones. It's a great job to have, but only so much of what we test really sticks and becomes a part of our daily routines. Every once in awhile we like to compare lists in our team chat room and then share them with you.

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Sponsor

Posterous

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

Discuss

The Geometry of Social Media – Why Triangles Rule

2009-11-11T11:56:50Z

Whether it’s your Facebook page, your blog, your Linkedin group, or your private brand community, your social media home base operates like a sports bar.

You first go to a sports bar for the amenities. The TVs. The food. The beer selection. But you return again and again not for the elements that brought you initially, but for the people. The regulars. The characters. The waitresses.

In my pre-fatherhood days, I used to go to a place called Big Daddy’s in north Phoenix. It was a little sketchy, but the food was decent, the beer was cold, and it was within walking distance. Then one Sunday, an ancient regular sitting across from me accidentally caught his oxygen mask on fire while trying to light a cigarette, and created an impromptu flame thrower that almost burned Big Daddy’s down. That’s the kind of humanity that builds loyalty.

Come for the Brand. Stay for the People

Social media is about community. And the connection between your customers and your company isn’t one.

Sure, interest in your brand will get customers to investigate your brand community (as long as you give them a rationale). But unless you facilitate connections between your customers, and let them build bridges between one another, they’ll show up, have a couple drinks, and keep moving.

I’m no visual information genius like David Armano, but I’ll try to represent this difference graphically. Here’s how the relationship between companies and their customers has historically been structured:

Here’s how that relationship changes in social media (which is an improvement, but still not ideal):

How Can You Build a Triangle?

This is what you want. This is a community. This is sustainable:

To build the triangle, you need to find ways to not just humanize your company, but put a spotlight on your customers. How can you get your customers telling the story of your brand from their perspective, not yours? Can you interview your customers? Create a directory of them? Let them help one another solve problems? Introduce them to one another? Encourage them to meet up or tweet up in their own towns?

Make Your Customers the Star, Not the Brand

Here’s an easy, relevant example from The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew, a Facebook group for homeschoolers. They feature a member each week, and tell their story via a Facebook note, giving the community the opportunity to learn more about that person and how homeschooling impacts their family.

How can you shine the light on your customers and build a triangle community? What examples have you found?

What Social Search Means To Your Business

2009-11-11T10:00:48Z

: Image via CrunchBase

Bing and Google recently announced partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to provide elements of real-time and social search to their respective search engine results. On the surface, this probably blew past most business owners and marketers as not much in the way of being important. If the information is online, aren’t Bing and Google supposed to find it?

And, frankly, the partnership has some interesting implications, but isn’t phenomenally noteworthy … yet.

Keep in mind that I am not a search expert. I don’t have coffee with Matt Cutts … or his cats. Nor do I have insider information about what search engines are doing. But I know what’s possible and think this is what we as social media thinkers and marketers need to be thinking about moving forward. For more of an industry analyst view, Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li have some great ideas that partially contributed to my ideas here.

What Bing and Google are tapping into are the message we post on social media sites. Those messages, at their core, are not Wikipedia pages or articles on newspaper websites, blogs or company sites. They are little pieces of social capital we trade with one another. Bing and Google are saying these little innocuous tidbits are relevant, to some degree, in results for certain keywords.

In other words, a popular Tweet about Ford Mustangs (Retweeted, linked to, etc.) could rank (and thus rank high) in search engine results for “Ford Mustang.”

Couple that thought with the fact that most search engines prioritize results based on recency and in-bound links (or how many third party people think that piece of content is good) and you start to see an indication that social search may be emerging as more relevant than we think. Quite frankly, it may be becoming more relevant than it should be.

The future of search seems to indicate that the most relevant content presented by the search engines will include, and perhaps prioritize, recommendations and referrals from our social graph. So when you search for “cheap hotel Chicago” the No. 1 result may not be the hotel that wins a search result for the term like you would see today, but the cheapest hotel in Chicago that someone you know has reviewed online. Or perhaps the top result will be a Tweet a friend sent out about a “good, cheap hotel in Chicago” just 10 minutes ago.

This is both promising and problematic. Promising because we care about our friend’s recommendations more than strangers. Problematic because for many, social media has changed our definition of “friend.” Promising because real-time and socially powered search has the potential to deliver more relevant results. Problematic because it also has the potential to deliver user-generated blather as opposed to qualified, quality information.

What social search means for marketers now, however, is this: If you do not start now building a network of fans, followers and friends who trust you, your company or your brand, you may quickly become irrelevant in not just social media, but in search too. Tell your curmudgeonly CEO if your company doesn’t participate in or prioritize social media, you’ll soon lose your search standing and see if that doesn’t help.

I could be wrong. The search engineers at Bing, Google and others may have a more (in my opinion) responsible way of incorporating social graph data points into our search results than this premise indicates. But if I’m even close to correct and the wisdom of crowds mentality of the Google world we live in prevails, your lack of participation and prioritization of social media may just bite you in the SERP. And that’s gonna hurt.

It Is Official, Twitter Is The Microblogging De Facto Standard

2009-11-11T12:06:41Z

Earlier this week, we saw that LinkedIn announced a partnership with Twitter. The basic idea is that LinkedIn status updates (yes, they have them too), can now be pushed to Twitter, and Twitter updates will be pulled into LinkedIn using the #in hashtag. This does not sound like much and Marshall Kirkpatrick says as much in his ReadWriteWeb post:

I don’t mean to be too grouchy, but this looks like just one more sweetheart Silicon Valley deal that has limited imagination and represents a lost opportunity for the kind of innovation everyone expects these kinds of companies to drive.

Marshall does have a point. Why make a big deal out of something like this? First, LinkedIn does not really want to be a purely stodgy old business network. It really wants to be Facebook, but for your business connections. They know they have opportunities to grow that they might be missing. Otherwise, why add status updates to LinkedIn at all? By making this “partnership” they add some of the Twitter buzz to LinkedIn.

In reality, this is more about not missing the boat. Twitter has become the de facto standard for microblogging. I am not saying this due to their level of traffic. If that were true, we would be saying this about Facebook. The difference is that you need to write an application on Facebook that meets specific requirements, and users need to install and approve the application before it can post updates for the user. That really limits what data gets into Facebook from third party applications.

Twitter has a read/write API that has been used for ages now. There are third party clients that people depend on and various applications like Twitterfeed and Tweetmeme use it as well. A read/write API is not news, but the number of people that use it is definitely news. More importantly, let’s look at who is using the API:

LinkedIn
MySpace
Facebook (through applications)
FriendFeed
FourSquare
BrightKite
Google Reader
Amazon

And, there are tons of smaller applications that write to Twitter as well. There are some interesting points to note as well. Three of the world’s most popular social networks push status updates to Twitter. Most of the mobile-location applications post updates to Twitter. Google Reader now allows you to post shared stories to Twitter. Finally, Amazon made it simpler to post affiliate links to Twitter.

Given that all of these applications work with Twitter, it is safe to assume that Twitter has become the infrastructure that the founders have always desired. So, if you are developing an application that works with social media in some way, there are two questions you need to ask yourself. First, how are you integrating with Facebook? Second, how are you integrating with Twitter?

The Future of Marketing

2009-11-11T14:05:18Z

I hesitate to say that the Social Network Race is over – look at AOL, MySpace and Friendster, all of which used to dominate – but let’s face it, all of these former giants now pale compared to Facebook and Google (and Twitter, if we’re also measuring based on buzz).

Unlike those early players, today’s winners are holding a much more winning hand. Google and Facebook are shooting arrows in the backs of those original pioneers.

The reason Facebook and Google will be the long-term winners: it’s not just the fact that they have critical mass, but that that critical mass comes at a time when Social Networks are not just destinations (a la the old AOL and MySpace), but are becoming integral to the holistic Web Experience.

There will be room for niche social networks, too, of course, like Ning and LinkedIn. For as much value as people see in the bang-for-the-buck they receive by joining the biggest social networks, they also don’t like to feel like a member of the faceless hordes. Joining a virtual knitting circle on Ning provides intimacy and smaller-bore friendships.

And your activities on a site like Ning will help refine the experiences you get elsewhere, i.e., the ads or causes or friend suggestions you see on Facebook will skew towards promoting the known behaviors of the “knitter” psychographic profile.

And so, now that we know the presumptive winners of the Social Networking Era, we can move forward into the not-so-distant future, to envision how we’ll handle The New Marketing…

When we surf and when we search, beyond the Social Network sites, we’re going to be taking our Friends with us; we’re taking our known online activities with us. Sites and search engines will re-orient themselves dynamically to match our identities. The entire Web experience will re-architect itself on-the-fly based on where we’ve been, what device we’re using, what we’ve looked at or purchased in the past, who we are friends with, what offers and content our contacts have been sharing and purchasing, etc.

In the future, the Web you know will be based on the Web that knows you.

This is validated, quite easily, by the efforts of Google and Facebook, with their competing “Connect” products, which also vie with the OpenID standard. The Masters of the Web are desperate to lodge themselves in our extended online activities.

We can also feel pretty confident that this will all happen because Social Media has simply become an unstoppable force. When “checking Social Networking sites” trumps “checking email” (Nielsen: Global Online Media Landscape report, April 2009) you know the marketers are on the hunt. According to MarketingSherpa in a 2009 report, Social Media Marketing topped the list of marketing execs’ future spending plans.

The social networks are just going to “follow that money.” Who could blame them?

That might not be such a bad thing, as “following the money,” in this case, could well result in a more custom-tailored online experience that leverages the experiences of friends and connections in a mutually beneficial way.

What will this future of marketing mean for marketers? How will it change our approach?

First off, I suspect a lot of the Long Tail stuff, e.g., making special offers based on known behaviors and connections, will be automated: it’s too hard to scale otherwise, and besides this is not so far removed from Search Engine Marketing techniques, from a tools & mindset perspective.

However, that doesn’t mean that we’ll devolve back to the Influencers-Are-Paramount mindset that led to the PR spam that plagued our industry (and those poor Influencers) for the past 50 years, either. We’ll become more sophisticated: we’ll be able to identify micro-influencers and influencers-of-influencers.

Want examples? You always want examples.

Before delving into examples of human-based outreach, let’s look at how Social Media might be used by marketers to automate the way they interact with consumers online, in a way that syncs with the growing desire for an opt-in (low-scandal) experience.

I foresee a day when consumers will be able to turn on/off disclosure preferences from within their social profiles (or even their browsers), to actively change their daily surfing, e.g., sometimes a consumer will want her entire web experience to re-orient itself around the fact that she is an avid yoga enthusiast: so she’ll activate that detailed keyword on a day when she’s in the market for a new yoga mat or a new yoga partner.

Her travels across the social web on that day will reveal advertisements for Nike’s YoGirl Yoga Mat and the Boston Sports Club — and the advertisements may offer special discounts if this consumer is known to have over 300 friends within her metro. Based on how the “yoga enthusiast” keyphrase has re-oriented her psychographic profile for the day (“she’s healthy, but not hardcore; mindful; probably charitable and green-minded”), she’ll also be invited to participate in a 5K walkathon for a local eco-charity. Her next visit to Yelp will emphasize healthy eating establishments. Once she’s purchased those new sneakers, found a new yoga partner, etc., the consumer will switch off her “Yoga Girl” identity and resume her websurfing in a more generic way…

That’s a pretty awesome vision in and of itself. But marketers crave personal interaction; they want active brand ambassadors; they need differentiation and buzz.

So, looking at the future of marketing outreach in a social age: Let’s say you sell baking supplies. In ye olden days, you’d look to place articles in Modern Baking to reach wholesale prospects and Martha Stewart Living to reach consumers. More recently, perhaps you’d add mombloggers to the mix. Maybe you’d also reach out to one of the baker’s dozen’s worth of active Baking-related groups on Facebook.

But in the near future, you’ll add @ChillieFalls (Jason’s dad) to your list of outreach targets. Why? Because Mr. Falls is a maker of funnel cakes, and he’s active on Twitter. Given that Twitter dominates Google and Bing’s incipient real-time search results, if you’re selling baking supplies you’ll want to court Mr. Falls. His tweets about your product could easily show-up prominently in those real-time results.

Imagine that: the efforts you expended courting a managing editor at Martha Stewart Living are now spent getting to a funnel cake maker in Virginia.

And when you want to reach the notice of Chris Brogan, maybe you’ll use a service like BackType to note the 8 people whose comments Chris wants to keep tabs on, and you’ll try to influence them by initiating a dialogue that they find helpful. Maybe your examination of their public interactions suggests that they have a favorite charity or a quirky interest in exotic cartoon art: knowing this you can figure out a way to satisfy their engagement preferences, and generate content and dialogue worth spreading via their blogs, tweets — or private conversations with Mr. Brogan. Congratulations! — you’ve influenced the influencer of an Influencer.

And that’s how tomorrow’s game is going to be played.

Like this post? Would you consider sharing it on Facebook? Tweeting about it? Forwarding to a friend? Subscribing by email or RSS? Leaving a comment? Sharing is caring!

Beyond Social Media

2009-11-11T15:06:53Z

Consider the possibility that “social media” is a crock.

Or at least bear with that thought through Defrag, which takes place in Denver over today and Thursday, and for which the word “social” appears seventeen times in the agenda. (Perspective: “cloud” appears three times, and “leverage” twice.)

What prompts the crock metaphor is this survey, to which I was pointed by this tweet from Howard Rheingold. (I don’t know if the survey is by students of Howard’s Digital Journalism Workspace class, though I assume so.)

While the survey is fine for its purposes (mostly probing Twitter-based social media marketing) and I don’t mean to give it a hard time, it does a nice job at bringing up a framing issue for social media that has bothered me for some time. You can see it in the survey’s first two questions: What Social Media platforms do you use? and How often are you on social media sites?

The frame here is real estate. Or, more precisely, private real estate. Later questions in the survey assume is that social media is something that happens on private platforms, Twitter in particular. This is a legitimate assumption, of course, and that’s why I have a problem with it. That tweeting it is a private breed of microblogging verges on irrelevance. Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.

Missing in action is credit to what goes below private platforms like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook — namely the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of standards that comprise the deep infrastructure, the geology, that makes social media (and everything else they support) possible.

Look at four other social things you can do on the Net (along with the standards and protocols that support them): email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME); blogging (HTTP, XML, RSS, Atom); podcasting (RSS); and instant messaging (IRC, XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE). Unlike private social media platforms, these are NEA: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them and Anybody can improve them. That’s what makes them infrastructural and generative. (Even in cases where protocols were owned, such as by Dave Winer with RSS, efforts were made to remove ownership as an issue.)

Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. Some still are. Check out this list of instant messaging protocols. It’s a mess. That’s because so many of the commonly-used platforms of ten years ago are still, in 2009, private silos. There’s a degree of interoperability, thanks mostly to Google’s adoption of XMPP (aka Jabber) as an IM protocol (Apple and Facebook have too). But it’s going slow because AOL, MSN and Yahoo remain isolated in their own silos. Or, as Walt Whitman put it, “demented with the mania of owning things”. With tweeting we do have interop, and that’s why tweeting has taken off while IM stays stagnant. But we don’t have NEA with Twitter, and that’s why tweeting is starting to stagnate, and developers like Dave are working on getting past it.

Here’s my other problem with “social media” as it shows up in too many of the 103 million results it currently brings up on Google: as a concept (if not as a practice) it subordinates the personal.

Computers are personal now. So are phones. So, fundamentally, is everything each of us does. It took decades to pry computing out of central control and make it personal. We’re in the middle of doing the same with telephony — and everything else we can do on a hand-held device.

Personal and social go hand-in-hand, but the latter builds on the former.

Today in the digital world we still have very few personal tools that work only for us, are under personal control, are NEA, and are not provided as a grace of some company or other. (If you can only get it from somebody site, it ain’t personal.) That’s why I bring up email, blogging, podcasting and instant messaging. Yes, there are plenty of impersonal services involved in all of them, but those services don’t own the category. We can swap them out. They are, as the economists say, substitutable.

But we’re not looking at the personal frontier because the social one gets all the attention — and the investment money as well.

Markets are built on the individuals we call customers. They’re where the ideas, the conversations, the intentions (to buy, to converse, to relate) and the money all start. Each of us, as individuals, are the natural points of integration of our own data — and of origination about what gets done with it.

Individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture. Starting with the social keeps us from working on empowering individuals natively. That most of the social action is in silos and pipes of hot and/or giant companies slows things down even more. They may look impressive now, but they are a drag on the future.

Defrag wraps tomorrow with a joint keynote tled “Cluetrain at 10″, On stage will be JP Rangaswami, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and yours truly. We don’t have plans for it yet, but I want it to be personal as well as social, and a conversation with the rest of the crowd there. Among other things I want to probe what we’re not doing because “social” everything is such a bubble of buzz right now.

See some of ya there. And the rest of you on the backchannels.

The power of OpenID

2009-11-11T08:47:35Z

[disclaimer: this post is related to my work as CEO of Glubble]

OpenID

Yesterday was a big day for Glubble, a private social network for (extended) families including small children. We introduced the ability to register and log in to Glubble with existing accounts from other services using OpenID.

The continuous battle for the consumer has led to a wilderness of services fighting to lock in the identity (data) of the user. Services require the user to register with e-mail addresses and passwords, forcing all of us to maintain multiple identities across services. Once in, its hard to get out again.

Ideally I would like to see services appear that have only one purpose, to protect your identity on the web. It’s like a bank which only serves you and your identity and doesn’t have any other commercial activities (like advertisement based business models for example). It ensures that you are in control of your identity. Your identity, and related to that the ability to control your privacy, is probably the most valuable thing on the web and we tend to give it away easily for some fool’s gold. It’s nearly impossible to create a marketplace for identity providers, mostly because there is no business model that can create such a market. We don’t understand nor care its important, and currently we aren’t willing to pay for it.

The next best thing besides neutral identity providers is OpenID. OpenID allows consumers to re-use an existing (and trusted) identity. If you already have an account with Google, or Facebook, or whatever, OpenID let’s you re-use that account to register and log into new services. After speaking with Chris Messina, OpenID advocate, we decided to implement OpenID for Glubble. I believe we now may be the first service for families on the web supporting OpenID.

The benefits for the consumer are huge. A nearly 1-click registration and log in process replaces the need to remember yet another e-mail address and password combination. We’ve gone live with it yesterday, and although it is premature to discuss statistics, I can say now that already 50% of new users are registering with one of the OpenID options we currently provide! I expect this nr to increase when we add more providers in the coming days. If you want to, you can give it a try here.

At Glubble we are committed to putting the user in control. Providing an OpenID registration and log in is the first step. We will continue to add more controls that empowers the Glubble user to take control of his identity and privacy. We ‘re doing this the hard way (everything on Glubble is private by default, and we let the user decide what he wants to share publicly). But in the end we feel it will help the consumer to become more aware of the need to be in control of identity and privacy.

OpenID is the first step, and we are very happy with it

Posted in Chris Messina, Family, Glubble for Families, OpenID Tagged: Chris Messina, families, Glubble, OpenID

Reasons To Follow A Brand On Twitter

2009-11-11T11:31:48Z

via readwriteweb.com

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What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing

2009-11-11T15:22:31Z

You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?

Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”

In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.

You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.

Because that kid always remains at our core (and if you’ve ever caught yourself playing kids’ games with genuine enjoyment, you know that it does), our base motivations remain as well. They just get a little harder to see.

Kids ask for love; adults have complicated passive-aggressive relationships. Kids eat what tastes good; adults want the cupcake, but worry about it going straight to their thighs.

So you want to learn about marketing? Well, despite the complicated models and terminology that some of the gurus use, it’s actually quite simple. To see what works and why, all you have to do is look to my boy.

Make the customer “want that”

When the TV is on in our house, there are sometimes twelve sequential minutes of relative quiet. Then, as the commercials come on, we get a loud play-by-play as Austin begins talking loudly to nobody:

“I want that.”

“I don’t want that.”

“I want that. That last thing. Not that; the thing before.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as incredibly annoying, but if you think about it, it’s actually really revealing.

(OK, it’s incredibly annoying too.)

Without all of those complex adult filters, kids are a conduit to something we don’t normally allow in the adult world: pure desire. There are none of the shoulds and should nots, no rationalizations and thoughts of what is proper or responsible.

That kid is still inside everyone. So the dead-simple lesson is this: Every sale starts with pure desire. Customers either “want that” or they don’t. The rest is just mental gymnastics to justify that core emotion.

Know what your customer really wants

Recently, Austin stormed through a six pack of kids’ yogurt so that we’d buy more, because each six pack had a tiny, ridiculous comic book inside. Yoplait could have filled those containers with shredded paper and they still would have gotten our dollars if Austin had his way.

Did he want the yogurt? Not so much. He wanted the comic book.

Similarly, we sometimes go to McDonald’s because of the dumb little toys they stick in Happy Meals. Or because of the giant playlands they have everywhere.

I have this experiment I keep meaning to try: I want to tell Austin that McDonald’s serves food, because I think he may be surprised to learn it. We don’t go to McDonald’s for the food. We go for the Batmobile that fires a small plastic stick at the back of my head while I’m driving.

Now . . . Wendy’s? We don’t go to Wendy’s. Their kids’ meal prizes are audiobooks on CD. Bleh. Same basic food, but none of what the boy really wants.

Interestingly, as I write this, I’m sitting at a Borders book store. There’s also a Barnes & Noble in town, but they don’t have as many big poofy chairs to sit in, and their ambient music is too loud. Apparently both stores have the same books, but I wouldn’t know that because I just come here to buy a latte and work in a comfortable chair.

Don’t lie to your customers

Cheers to McDonald’s for recognizing that small toys will get kids in the door. But jeers to our local managers for failing the “implied contract with the customer” test.

Recently, my wife and I were assaulted by a barrage of McDonald’s requests because the current pieces of plastic junk that the clerks were dropping into Happy Meals were Bakugan figures, which are Japanese balls that transform into things. (Don’t ask.)

My wife took Austin once and he returned angry, showing me a nondescript plastic Pancho Villa-like figure with a spinning sombrero. Later, I took him and despite the display for Bakugan, we again walked away with a bogus replacement — a miniature stuffed monkey.

Twice burned, Austin’s McDonald’s lust backed off significantly. And, seeing as our son had been lied to twice, my wife and I instituted a temporary boycott.

Associative conditioning works

We often buy SpongeBob SquarePants macaroni and cheese. It’s terrible. For some reason, a complicated spongelike lattice doesn’t present cheese and pasta in a pleasing ratio. And yet Austin eats it and requests it again and again because SpongeBob is on the box.

I tested the limits of this adoration yesterday over dinner. Austin hates lettuce more than anything in the world, so I asked him if he would eat lettuce that had SpongeBob printed on the leaves and came with a free coloring book. He was all over it.

Then he got mad at me when I told him that such lettuce didn’t exist.

Of course, this only works on small children. Only kids are dumb enough to fall for such a simple trick, right?

Um, not quite. Most advertising is based around associative conditioning, which is taking something that you already like and pairing it with something that they want you to like. Or with someone you already like, in the form of a celebrity (or sponge) endorsement.

You may not buy terrible macaroni because a cartoon tells you to, but you buy Nikes because LeBron James endorses them. Or you buy a phone you can’t actually talk on because it’s white with a silver Apple on it. And if you don’t do those things, then I’ll bet you were buying Pepsi because of Michael Jackson back before they lit his hair on fire.

You may be standing up and denying angrily that you do any of those things, but billions of advertiser dollars say either that you’re quite unique or that you’re mistaken. Maybe you don’t come out and say, “Ooh, Tiger Woods. I want that!” but it happens anyway — deep down, at the inner child level.

Like so many things, marketing can appear way more complicated than it is. But marketing is simple — not always easy, but simple. In fact, it’s so simple that you may be overlooking the reasons it works when it does, and why it doesn’t work when it fails.

If you have kids, look to them. See what they like, and why they like it. See what pushes their buttons, because it’ll tell you a ton. Kids aren’t dumb. They’re just adults without all of those complicated outer layers.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is giving a free teleclass called Attract Clients, Lose the Stress, and Do What You Love tomorrow (November 12, 2009) with his marketing veteran mother. She knows Johnny’s inner child better than he does, because she lived with it for eighteen years.

Check in and get freebies (I mean free beers)

2009-11-11T00:21:34Z

We’re excited about this: check in at the Rackhouse Pub and you’ll be greeted with a treat. Just show your server that you’re checked in on Brightkite and the first drink is free.

This is just the beginning. We’re opening up free promotions to any business who would like to participate. Do you run a local cafe, bar, coffee shop, or other business? Sign up now!

Do you know businesses that would benefit from connecting with the community around them? Tell them about us!

Friend us on Brightkite or follow Twitter and we’ll let you know about other promotions as they become available.

Cheers!

Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

2009-11-11T00:15:00Z

Since the launch of Google Latitude earlier this year, we've been getting a lot of feature requests. One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you've been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you're near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we're happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude.

Google Location History
Whether you're taking a road trip across the country, backpacking across Europe, or just going out for a night on the town, it's fascinating to look back at where you went, and for how long you stayed. Enable Google Location H istory to store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order. Of course, you can always delete selected history or your entire location history at any time. While working on Location History, I found myself going back in time to discover things that would have otherwise been impossible. For example, I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps: Drooling Dog Bar BQ. Check it out below:

Google Location Alerts (beta)
People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

To enable these features, go to google.com/latitude/apps. You must first be an existing Google Latitude user; if you're not already, sign up here. You must explicitly enable each feature, and of course, you can disable it at any time. Learn more in the Help Center about Location Alerts and Location History, suggest and vote on ideas in the Mobile Product Ideas page, or report problems in the Mobile Help Forum.

Posted by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

The Real Promise of the Social Web

2009-11-10T20:44:43Z

This is the video my son is watching right now. Earlier today, he wandered into my office holding a math book with a confused look on his face. One look at the page of quadratic graphs led BOTH of us to have confused looks on our faces. First thing I did after fumbling through the pages of the book trying to figure this stuff out, was to search on Google for solutions, but I got really awful results (so much darn SEO crap). So I turned, in desperation, to Twitter:

And got back multiple replies: offers for help, introductions to professional tutors online, links to websites and suggestions for resources (including the awesome YouTube video above from YourTeacher.com).

Within minutes, my son was watching the video on YouTube and went from utter confusion to ‘a-ha!’ – disempowered to empowered. And all that needed to be in place was:

People who are generous and wonderful enough to spend the time to create these awesome resources online (for free!) to empower kids.
Generous and knowledgeable friends in my network.

Okay, so it’s not as simple as I make it sound, but this is the most powerful personal experience I’ve had on the web in a long time. It solved a real-world problem and made a huge difference in the life of my son, who I care about more than anything. This is the real promise of the social web. Let’s not forget that.

Mehr Mut zum Dialog

2009-11-10T08:26:36Z

Bild: Das deutsche “Twitterparlament” eine Woche vor der Bundestagswahl; Text: nzz

Mit einer Ein-Wort-Mitteilung kommentierte US-Präsident Barack Obama am 9. Oktober seine Auszeichnung mit dem Friedensnobelpreis: „Humbled“ (demütig), so lautete das Tweet, das um 11:31 Washingtoner Zeit über Twitter in die Welt gesendet wurde. In ihm ist die Twitterstrategie Obamas kondensiert, die ihm auch im Präsidentschaftswahlkampf 2008 zum Erfolg verholfen hat. (1) Obama twittert mit klaren kurzen Aussagen, (2) er überschwemmt seine knapp 2.4 Millionen Follower nicht mit sinnlosen Nachrichten und (3) er verweist fast immer auf weitergehende Hintergrund- oder Mobilisierungsinformationen, die über andere Webkanäle (Youtube, Whitehouse Website, Facebook etc.) zur Verfügung stehen. Unter anderem durch diese Nutzung von Twitter ist es dem Obama- Kampagnenmanagement gelungen, den ersten echten Web-Wahlkampf zu führen, insbesondere die jüngere Generation der Wählerinnen und Wähler wieder für Politik zu interessieren und dabei mit etwa zwei Millionen US-Dollar Spendeneinkünften pro Tag zum erfolgreichsten Fundraiser der US-Wahlkampfgeschichte zu werden.

Obamas Webkommunikationsstrategie gilt seitdem als Benchmark, an der sich auch viele Politiker und Parteien in Europa orientieren wollen. Im Zentrum der politischen Kommunikationsrevolution steht derzeit Twitter, der Microbloggingdienst, über den Kurznachrichten von maximal 140 Zeichen in die Welt gesendet werden können. Mit einem Zuwachs von knapp 1.400 Prozent von Anfang 2008 bis Anfang 2009 hat Nielsen Research Twitter zur am schnellsten wachsenden Web 2.0-Plattform ausgerufen.

Erfolg und Reichweite, diese beiden Kriterien haben auch die deutschen Politiker veranlasst, im zurückliegenden Bundestagswahlkampf das Experiment Twitter zu wagen. Das Potenzial von Twitter wurde von vielen deutschen Politikern allerdings erst auf den letzten Metern entdeckt. Mehr als Dreiviertel aller identifizierten politischen Accounts wurden erst im Jahr 2009 eröffnet, der letzte im Endspurt des Wahlkampfes knapp zwei Wochen vor der Abstimmung. Barack Obama hingegen startete seine Onlinekampagne auf Twitter bereits im April 2007 und somit mehr als 18 Monate vor der Wahl. Gerade Onlinemedien leben vom Vertrauen der Nutzer in die Botschaften des Absenders und dieses Vertrauen lässt sich nicht über Nacht schaffen, sondern muss langfristig aufgebaut werden.

Das ist nicht der einzige Grund dafür, dass es den deutschen Politikern schwergefallen ist, die Wähler über das Netz zu mobilisieren. Erste Ergebnisse einer Analyse von 577 politischen Twitteraccounts im Zeitraum der deutschen Bundestagswahl durchgeführt vom Institut für Medien- und Kommunikationsmanagement der Universität St. Gallen verdeutlichen, dass der Wahlkampf über soziale Medien aus der Experimentierphase noch nicht heraus ist. Die wenigsten Politiker hatten eine konkrete Informations- oder Mobilisierungsstrategie und es fehlte oft an spannenden Inhalten sowie an Möglichkeiten der dialogischen Kommunikation.

(1) Kein klares Kommunikationsziel: Die Mehrzahl der Politiker ist auf Twitter weder regelmässig aktiv, noch werden deren Inhalte abonniert. Hier wird deutlich, dass sich Konventionen in der politischen Kommunikation über Twitter noch nicht etabliert haben und den Politikern die Kommunikationsideen fehlen. Die Inhalte der Tweets schwanken zwischen Werbung für die eigene Webseite, Hinweisen auf aktuelle Veranstaltungen, beinhalten aber auch Verweise auf das Wetter und andere Banalitäten. So sind die Politiker dann auch eher untereinander im eigenen Lager vernetzt anstatt Anhänger in anderen politischen Lagern zu finden oder mit ihren Wählern zu kommunizieren. Ohne Botschaft und Kommunikationsziel führen die Parteien auf Twitter also vornehmlich Selbstgespräche.

(2) Quantität ist nicht Qualität: Von den fleissigsten Politik-Twitterern gehört niemand zu den populärsten gemessen an der Zahl der Follower. Trotz Fleiss also kein Preis. Lediglich die neugegründete Piratenpartei trifft auf erhebliche digitale Akzeptanz. Der Account der Partei hat fast 20.000 Follower, der des Spitzenkandidaten immerhin noch über 11.000. Bei den etablierten Parteien können nur die Grünen ansatzweise mithalten. Das mag in Deutschland derzeit zur Spitze reichen, ist jedoch äusserst wenig im Vergleich zu den zweieinhalb Millionen Followern Barack Obamas oder den 150.000 Followern Sarah Palins.

(3) Fälschungen begeistern Follower: Unter den Top 10 der Accounts mit den meisten Followern sind mehrere Fälschungen zu finden. Unter dem Namen der deutschen Kanzlerin wird gleich mehrfach falsch getwittert. Sowohl der Account „Merkel_CDU“ als auch „Angie_Merkel“ werden nicht aus dem Bundeskanzleramt, sondern von Privatpersonen betrieben, die Spekulationen über das Privatleben von FDP-Chef Westerwelle und anderen Unsinn in die Welt schicken. Beide Accounts zählen mit etwa 5.000 Followern zur Top-Ten-Liste der erfolgreichsten „Politiker“-Tweets. Auch SPD-Chef Franz Müntefering und SPD-Kanzlerkandidat Frank Walter Steinmeier sind bei Twitter aktiv und gehören mit jeweils um die 5.000 Followern zu den Top Ten, unabhängig von der Tatsache, dass es sich um gefälschte Twitteridentitäten handelt.

Wenn ein Grossteil der deutsche Spitzenpolitik Twitter ignoriert, wird das von Dritten eben zur Profilierung oder für zweifelhafte Spässe genutzt. Es gibt aber auch das Gegenbeispiel: Hier nutzen Parteien bewusst falsche Accounts, um die politische Gegnerschaft blosszustellen. Die CDU in Nordrhein Westfalen lies beispielsweise die SPD-Politikerin Hannelore Kraft unter dem Namen „Kraftilanti“ mit falscher Stimme zwitschern. Insgesamt handelt es sich bei zwanzig Prozent der Accounts um Fälschungen. Ein Fünftel der Polittweets hat also mit Politik rein gar nichts zu tun. Hier zeigt sich ein Bedarf für verifizierbare Accounts für politische Persönlichkeiten, wie Twitter dies in den USA bereits erprobt.

Als Lektion aus dem deutschen Bundestagswahlkampf lassen sich drei Schlüsse ziehen:

(1) Politiker sollten sich ihre Accounts sichern und die Kommunikationsform des Microblogging erproben, bevor der nächste Wahltermin ansteht, um Erfahrungen zu sammeln und eine kontinuierliche Kommunikationsstrategie zu erarbeiten. In der Regel sind Follower auf Twitter sehr treu, dennoch verloren einige twitternde deutsche Politiker in den letzten zwei Wochen vor der Wahl bis zu einem Drittel ihrer Anhängerschaft. Im gleichen Zeitraum konnten die erfolgreichsten Werber ihre Followeranzahl gerade einmal um zehn Prozent steigern. Wenn deutsche Politiker die Massen auf Twitter mobilisiert haben, dann so dass sie ihnen teilweise in Scharen davonliefen.

(2) Es geht nicht darum, die Wähler mit Botschaften zu bombardieren, sondern gezielte Informationen mit Vertiefungshinweisen oder Mobilisierungscharakter zu senden, die einen Nutzwert für die Bürger haben. Barack Obama hat z. B. gerade einmal 374 Tweets in zweieinhalb Jahren veröffentlicht, dabei aber immer wieder konkrete Apelle an seine Anhänger gerichtet. Aus den Fehlern seiner Anfangszeit, als auch er über Belangloses twitterte, hat er schnell gelernt.

(3) Auch Twitter ist keine Einbahnstrasse. Wer bei Twitter erfolgreich und akzeptiert sein will, muss die Kommunikations- und Beziehungswünsche der Nutzer erwidern. Das Beispiel Obama zeigt, dass er neben Millionen Lesern auch selber knapp 750.000 anderen Twitterern folgt. Hierbei geht es nicht um eine aktive Kommunikation mit jedem einzelnen, sondern das Gefühl der Reziprozität als Basis für den Dialog. Gezielte persönliche Ansprache, gepaart mit konkreten Aufrufen, ist erfolgversprechender als auf das Fernsehprogramm von gestern oder das Wetter von morgen hinzuweisen.

Das Erfolgrezept für Twitter liegt in der richtigen Mischung zwischen drei wesentlichen Kommunikationstypologien, die die Analyse der Bundestagswahltweets erbracht hat: Es reicht nicht, „Statusstar“ zu sein, also kaum jemandem zu folgen, aber eine grosse Zahl von Followern an sich zu binden. Es genügt auch nicht, „Broadcaster“ zu sein, indem jeden Tag unzählige Botschaften ins Web gesendet werden. Man muss auch „Informationseeker“ sein, also ins Netz hineinhören und Freunde auf Twitter sammeln. Das wechselseitige Zuhören ist ein wesentliches Erfolgskriterium auch bei Twitter. Insofern unterscheidet sich die digitale Welt nicht sehr von der analogen.

OneRiot Realtime Search Goes Mobile with Taptu

2009-11-10T15:31:08Z

Today OneRiot is excited to announce a partnership with Taptu, the leading mobile search engine. As of this morning, Taptu searchers will find realtime results within Taptu.com’s mobile-optimized search experience, signifying the first integration of realtime results by a mobile search provider.

Taptu is the first mobile company to make use of the OneRiot realtime search API, incorporating the web’s freshest, most buzzed about content into Taptu’s mobile touch-friendly interface. Mobile users can now search the realtime web or browse trending topics, fulfilling a need for people to discover realtime, socially-influenced content on the go – one of the most significant developments in mobile search to date.

We had lots of fun working with the Taptu team while bringing this alliance to life, picking up lots of fascinating things about mobile search in the process. It’s interesting territory – rapidly expanding, increasingly significant territory – and it’s more dependent on realtime information than anything before.

Fun facts about mobile search:

+ The majority of mobile searches originate from smartphones, a market that represents 15% of the handheld market (and that grew by over 105% in 2008)

+ With the advent of the iPhone, mobile search has grown by 5x in frequency

+ Mobile search requires a different version of optimization than desktop search, supporting a different set of desires and expectations. According to behavioral research, mobile searchers expect to be entertained as well as informed, and want to discover web pages that are optimized for mobile (many of the websites indexed by traditional search engines are not).

+ A full 41% of cell phone owners (smart or otherwise) say they fill in free time when they are traveling or waiting for someone by making phone calls, and many of these owners do so using search

These realities and more serve to confirm one of the most buzzed about revelations of the past few years: People are thinking of their mobiles as a portable computer, relying on their cell phones as a source of information, entertainment and sociability. But like we said, these on-the-fly information seekers are distinctly different than their desktop browsing counterparts. Sometimes, they’re searching for distinct pieces of information – for example, the phone number of a restaurant they’re hoping to make a reservation at – but frequently they have other goals in mind. Mobile search is more social, discovery-driven and experience sensitive than its predecessor - which is why its taken a new, specified engine like Taptu to make some sense of it all.

As we’ve chatted about before, realtime results help people find what’s happening, right now, for any subject. Not long ago, finding that fresh information required a steady perch at your desktop, but today that ‘nowness’ is in no way confined to a monitor. OneRiot believes that the mobile web is inherently suited for the fresh, buzzworthy events of the realtime web – in fact, it is frequently the very source of it - and we know that the future of mobile search is bright.

The Taptu/OneRiot partnership has brought a new level of accessibility to realtime search, allowing people on the go to find the news that matter most, right now. We know you’ll love the first result of our ongoing collaborations with Taptu, and we can’t wait to show you the rest in the coming weeks.

Learn more about realtime and mobile search with the Taptu and OneRiot Whitepapers:

Taptu Whitepaper
OneRiot Whitepaper

Taptu search with OneRiot results is available on the major touch devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, Nokia N 97 and 5800, and the Blackberry Storm 1. Read Taptu’s blog about the partnership here!

The Perfect Combination

2009-11-10T15:48:00Z

As our platform team works with more and more developers to expand access to information, users are able to tweet and read tweets in expanding ways across the web. Today, LinkedIn launched a smart integration that lets you sync up your account with Twitter to allow for an easy flow of information to take place between your networks.

You’ll be able to set your professional status and display more fresh content on your LinkedIn profile via Twitter. And, showing your stream in places off of Twitter.com will connect you to even more people. Shared interest in tips, news, leaders and perspectives can thrust conversations into virtual brainstorms and even business opportunities.

The peanut butter and the chocolate have come together to make the perfect combination. Enjoy!

The Rapid Evolution of Search

2009-11-10T12:57:19Z

Source

Over the past several weeks, leaders in the search industry launched an aggressive, very public series of campaigns designed to capture the elusive future of search mind and market share.

The accelerated evolution of “real-time” search, introduced to us mostly through the adoption of Summize, which was eventually acquired to now serve as Twitter search, inspired both Google and Bing to release new iterations of its search engine to now include live Twitter results. Bing also announced a deal with Facebook to include status updates and shared content that were intentionally earmarked for public consumption – although this is expected to go into effect at a later date. Each announcement was strategically timed to release during the prestigious Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco while the technology world focused on tomorrow’s trends discussed during the show. With the great deal of attention thrust upon these two industry giants, Yahoo is now rumored to also have a real-time strategy in the works. Unlike Bing and Google however, Yahoo is potentially seeking to either partner with or acquire a current real-time search player.

And, just when we thought that the barrage of innovation was complete for the time being, Google announced another breakthrough that ushers in a new era of hybrid search, combining traditional search algorithms and social media. With Social Search, Google now introduces the results sourced from your social graph related to your original search term. For example, if you “Google” the name of a local restaurant, you will receive standard results in addition to other social media content such as a review posted by a friend in Yelp. Or, if you’re searching a topic, a friend’s blog post on the subject may also surface in the results. Social Search provides a peer-to-peer element to everyday research packaged in an existing paradigm that doesn’t alter your patterns or behavior for discovery.

With the rapid-fire progression of iterations and innovation in search, perhaps we need to press pause, take a breath, and assess the current evolution and its potential impact on Internet behavior and culture. After all, as we recently discussed, everything essentially begins with some form of search.

Let’s start with defining the various options for search:

Traditional Search

Typical searches performed in established, leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo that display results based on propriety technology that indexes content and ranks results based on the assignment of weight and authority for a particular Web site or page that factors inbound links, keywords, relevance, etc. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often employed to boost the ranking of a page or site in the indexing and results. Obviously, there is greater reward for ranking in the top 1-2 pages of a search term and SEO contributes to the position of content intentionally anchored to specified keywords.

Real-Time Search

An emerging category of search, spawned by the adoption of Twitter search. In real-time search, content is readily discoverable as it’s published online – otherwise known as the live or now Web. Real-time Search engines include, Collecta (disclosure: I am a tech advisor), OneRiot, Topsy, among others. In most cases real-time search is usually associated with Twitter and Facebook results. If you search for iPhone, the results will funnel all results as they’re published to the Web, ordered by time, not necessarily weighted in authority. One of the reasons why I’m working with Collecta is because their view aligns with much of my work documenting the social landscape (The Conversation Prism.). The Collecta team believes that the real-time Web is much bigger than Twitter and Facebook. Whether the source is a Web site, blog post, Digg, YouTube video, Flickr image, Tweet, Facebook status update, note, video, or comment, or published in any relevant social network, real-time search should feed that content to keyword results. If you’re truly dedicated to unearthing conversations related to important terms or phrases, real-time search is only as relevant as its ability to channel real-world activity online.

Social Search

Unlike traditional and real-time search, social search leverages the activity within a personal social graph to surface activity and content related to keywords and phrases within social networks and social media. As Danny Sullivan says, social search is essentially “trusted search,” as it taps into your social circle to find people and related content and introduce it into a contextual environment – such as a search engine, feed reader, or social network.

Semantic Search

Semantic search is the promise of the next web. Search results are identified and presented contextually via natural language processing. The primary goal here is relevance based on your interest and intentions without you explicity communicating them in a search box. For example, if you search for Lincoln, it would know the difference between a city, automobile and person automatically. Instead of relying on ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, the science of meaning, to produce personalized and accurate search results.

Social Network Search

Until such time as traditional, social, or real-time search engines produce the weighted, trusted, and immediate results into one engine, it is necessary to search for relevant terms directly within communities social networks of interest. Each network provides a search box and usually their results are proprietary to each individual network (walled gardens). Yes, this a very manual form of search within each social network where keywords or keyword strings are manually input into the search boxes. But, the results are directly tied to content that’s produced by friends as well as those you don’t already know. This content is much more likely to be relevant to your research and in most cases, wouldn’t appear in any other format or engine as of now. This is one of the reasons why if you create and upload content within social networks such as YouTube, Flickr, Docstoc, etc., that you employ a form of SEO for Social Media, otherwise referred to as Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO is the intentional act of tagging, titling, describing and promoting content so that it is readily discoverable. SMO is a necessary element to inbound marketing.

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Gowalla und Foursquare erobern das Land

2009-11-10T09:46:39Z

Dieser Artikel ist als Gastbeitrag von mir ursprünglich auf dem Sympra-Blog am 9.11.2009 erschienen und wird hier noch mal veröffentlicht.

Die deutsche Geek-Szene hat mal wieder ein neues Spielzeug bekommen, und im Moment kann man häufiger folgende Szene auf Berlins Straßen beobachten: Menschen bleiben vor Lokalen stehen, zücken ihr iPhone oder Android aus der Tasche, verharren für einen einen kleinen Moment an Ort und Stelle, um erst dann das Lokal zu betreten.

Der Grund: Die beiden Location-Based Social Networks Gowalla und Foursquare haben Deutschland erreicht.

Location-Based Social Networks sind zwar in Summe nicht neu, gibt es neben Brightkite aus den USA mit Plazes einen prominenten Vertreter aus deutschen Landen, aber die zweite Generation ihrer Art weist einen erheblichen Unterschied zu den Vertretern der ersten Generation aus:

Man nutzt spielt Gowalla und Foursquare!

Beide Services haben zwar mit ihren Vorgänger im weitesten Sinne den gleichen Nutzen inne – nämlich den eigenen Freunden mitzuteilen, wo man sich gerade aufhält – aber der Anreiz die Applikation wirklich häufig zu nutzen ist ein völlig anderer geworden.

Der Gaming-Faktor

Beide Applikationen belohnen ihre Nutzer für Aktivität und schaffen Möglichkeiten, sich mit seinen Freunden zu vergleichen. Somit entstehen zusätzlich zum eigentlichen Nutzen zwei weitere Anreize:

virtuellen Belohnungen zu sammeln
besser als die eigenen Freunde zu sein

Der Ansatz von Gowalla fokussiert sich dabei um virtuelle Güter und Badges, die man erhalten kann. Je häufiger man eincheckt und eigene Orte anlegt, um so mehr Badges kann man freischalten. An jedem Ort gibt es dabei die Möglichkeit neue Items zu sammeln und diese mit anderen zu tauschen.

Diese Items haben dabei eine unterschiedliche Knappheit und somit wird hier auf einen der ältesten Anreize (Jäger und Sammler) überhaupt aufgebaut. Wird Gowalla zur Briefmarkensammlung des “Digital Native”?

Foursquare setzt ebenfalls auf Badges, um Aktivität zu belohnen, hat aber wiederum keine virtuellen Güter zu bieten, dafür aber das Konzept der “Mayors”. Die Person, die an einem Ort am häufigsten eincheckt, ist der Mayor der Location und wird als dieser auch besonders gekennzeichnet.

Beiden Plattformen bieten grundsätzlich die Möglichkeit, sich mit seinen Freunden zu vergleichen, um zu sehen, wer der Aktivste ist, wobei hier Foursquare durch ein integriertes Leaderboard und das Mayorship-Konzept die Nase leicht vorn hat.

Unabhängig von diesen unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen ist es aber unwahrscheinlich spannend, an sich selbst und Dritten zu beobachten, wie sehr diese Anreize eine Dynamik entwickeln können und letzten Endes wirklich dazu führen, dass eine Applikation häufiger genutzt wird.

Ein Prinzip, das sich auch jüngst erst Volkswagen mit der unwahrscheinlich erfolgreichen Kampagne TheFunTheory.com zu eigenen gemacht hat, bei der in diversen Videos tolle Beispiele gezeigt werden, wie die Nutzung z. B. einer Treppe anstatt einer Rolltreppe oder die Nutzung eines Altglascontainers dadurch erhöht werden konnte, dass es einfach mehr Spaß macht, es zu tun.

Und genau darum geht es hier: Es macht einfach unwahrscheinlich viel Spaß, mit Gowalla oder Foursqure zu spielen!

Potenziale für Werbetreibende

Die Frage die sich jetzt natürlich stellt, ist: Wie können auch Unternehmen diese neue Generation von Location-Based Social Networks in Zukunft für sich nutzen?

Lassen Sie mich Ihnen dazu drei einfache Beispiele nennen:

1. Location Based Advertising

Foursquare ermöglicht es schon heute in einem gewissen Rahmen auf ihrer Plattform zu werben. Hierbei spielen zwei Konzepte von Foursquare eine wichtige Rolle. Einmal das bereits erwähnte Konzept des “Mayors” und zusätzlich die Möglichkeit, dass Nutzer an jeweiligen Orten Tipps für ihre Freunde hinterlassen können.

Checke ich in einer Location ein und in der Nähe hat ein Freund von mir einen Tipp hinterlassen, werde ich benachrichtigt und bekomme den Hinweis auf dem iPhone eingeblendet.

Unternehmen können auf dieses Konzept aufsetzen und z. B. spezielle Angebote für Mayors unterbreiten, die dann nach dem gleichen Prinzip eingeblendet werden, wenn man in der Nähe eincheckt.

Das unter Geeks mehr als bekannte Cafe St.Oberholz in Berlin hat zum Beispiel bereits von dieser Möglichkeit Gebrauch gemacht. Am Wochenende habe ich in der Nähe des St. Oberholz bei Starbucks eingecheckt und habe daraufhin umgehend die Benachrichtigung bekommen, dass das St. Oberholz mir als Mayor eine Kaffee-Flatrate bieten würde.

Das hat mich in dem Moment wirklich positiv überrascht, und ich denke, hier liegt für die Zukunft noch viel Potenzial. Man fragt sich natürlich umgehend, wie das mal in Zukunft skalieren soll und wie man eine Lösung findet, dass solche Hinweise nicht als Spam empfunden werden – aber grundsätzlich finde ich es auch als Nutzer eine tolle Geschichte, in Abhängigkeit von meinem Real-Life Kontext nicht nur Tipps von meinen Freunden zu sehen, sondern durchaus auch kommerzielle Angebote angezeigt zu bekommen.

2. Branded Badges

Beide Dienste setzten darauf, dass man Badges für unterschiedlichste Aktivitäten bekommen kann. Hier liegt natürlich die Idee nahe, auch branded Badges für Aktivitäten auszugeben, die direkt mit einem Unternehmen zu tun haben.

So ist Foursquare z. B. eine Kooperation mit BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) eingegangen und bietet nun zusammen mit dem öffentlichen Transportsystem spezielle Badges an, die man dafür bekommt, wenn man die öffentliche Verkehrsmittel nutzt.

Darüber hinaus gibt es ein Gewinnspiel und damit die Möglichkeit, Gutscheine zu gewinnen, indem man aktiv Foursquare im Zusammenhang mit BART nutzt.

Was ist hier noch denkbar?

adidas gebrandete Badges, wenn ich auf Sportplätzen einchecke?
Lufthansa Badges, wenn ich auf Flughäfen einchecke?
McDonalds Badges, wenn ich bei McDonalds bin?

Oder vielleicht …

Gewinnspiele für adidas-Sportartikel?
Meilen bei Miles-And-More von der Lufthansa?
Digitale Gutscheine auf dem iPhone für einen Cheeseburger?

Hier sind der Fantasie vermutlich keine Grenzen gesetzt, und ich bin sehr gespannt, welche Werbemodelle wir in Zukunft in diesem Kontext noch sehen werden.

An dieser Stelle sei auch nochmal erwähnt, dass Gowalla bereits das Konzept der “Trips” integriert hat und man besondere Badges bekommen kann, wenn man vordefinierte “Trips” absolviert hat. Individuelle Trips lassen sich bereits von Nutzern vorschlagen, und der Schritt zu “Branded Trips”, die von Unternehmen eingereicht werden, ist da nicht mehr weit.

3. Virtuelle Güter

Bei Gowalla dreht es sich vor allem um die Items, die man sammeln kann und die eine gewisse Knappheit haben. Dieses Konzept kennt man schon lange von z. B. Social Games auf Facebook und wird auch dort bereits kampagnenorientiert eingesetzt.

Ein Unternehmen geht dabei eine Partnerschaft ein und bietet für einen bestimmten Zeitraum besondere Items an, die möglichst besonders “toll” sind, ggf. eine gerade laufende Werbekampagne unterstützen und den Nutzern die Möglichkeit geben, besondere Items zu erlangen.

Nach einem gewissen Zeitraum X gibt es diese Items nicht mehr, und auch damit wird eine Knappheit erzeugt. Somit entsteht ein Anreiz, bei diesen Kampagnen mitzumachen.

Fazit und Ausblick

Wir stehen von den Nutzerzahlen in Deutschland – als auch weltweit – noch ganz am Anfang der Entwicklung, und gerade Foursquare funktioniert in Deutschland aktuell nur für Nutzer in Berlin und München. Dennoch halte ich diese Entwicklung für mehr als spannend. Robert Scoble hat sich jüngst erst dazu hinreißen lassen, zu behaupten, dass Foursquare mal größer als Twitter wird.

Die Möglichkeiten für Werbetreibende sind dabei unwahrscheinlich spannend, da sich eine digitale Kampagne auf einmal an eine physische Präsenz über das GPS-fähige iPhone koppeln lässt und dabei alle viralen Kanäle wie Twitter und Facebook bereits integraler Bestandteil dieser Apps sind.

Was für den Erfolg gerade in Deutschland noch eine wichtige Rolle spielen wird, ist das ganze Thema “Privacy”. Aktuell sind zwar schon Möglichkeiten vorhanden, die Privacy bei Gowalla und Foursquare zu kontrollieren, dennoch glaube ich, dass hier noch viel Verbesserungspotenzial besteht und dass gerade deutsche Nutzer dort hohe Ansprüche haben werden.

Wer Gowalla einmal ausprobieren möchte, kann dies jederzeit tun und die Applikation auf seinem iPhone oder Android installieren. Foursquare wird sogar zusätzlich noch auf dem Blackberry unterstützt, ist im Moment aber auf Berlin und München beschränkt.

No related posts.

Data Without Borders is back: The Internet Identity Workshop

2009-11-10T11:44:57Z

It took a while before we restarted our podcast “Data Without Borders” but we are back on track with the third episode after the break where we talk about what happened at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) which happened last week.

We also got two new people on board: Eve Maler from PayPal who is also the chair of the Kantara Inititative’s User Managed Access Work Group and Elias Bizannes, like myself board member of the DataPortability Project.

Of course we also still have Trent Adams from the Internet Society (the organization behind the IETF) and another member of the DataPortability Project board: Steve Greenberg.

And last but not least we are now an official podcast of the DataPortability Project (whatever that actually means, in terms of content probably nothing and it should be noted that the opinions expressed in thep podcast are our personal opinions and not some official opinion of the DataPortability Project unless stated otherwise).

The Internet Identity Workshop

I heard a lot of very good things about the Internet Identity Workshop which happenes twice a year in Mountain View, CA. Unfortunately I never made it there though. But at least I know people who are going there and this time all of my podcast co-hosts have been there and so we talk about some topics which have been discussed there, like the future of OpenID, Webfinger, LRDD, XRD and lot of other upcoming and established standards.

But give it a listen yourself:

(Download MP3, 45 min, 46 MB)

For the shownotes check the blog entry.

You can also subscribe to us on iTunes.

We are also streaming the recording of new episodes live on fridays, 1800 UTC. More information will be posted to the Data Without Borders Twitter account.

Location Awareness / Location Apps Market

2009-11-10T13:53:03Z

via appadvice.com

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cpoetter's shared items in Google Reader

Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side

Misstep #1: Heavy focus on Tools

Misstep #2: Assuming that “anyone” can do this job (and for cheap)

Misstep #3: Neglecting Engagement

Misstep #4: Thinking Content is Inherently Valuable

Misstep #5: Making Social Synonymous with Traffic or Lead Generation

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Check in and get freebies (I mean free beers)

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Gowalla und Foursquare erobern das Land

Der Gaming-Faktor

Potenziale für Werbetreibende

1. Location Based Advertising

2. Branded Badges

3. Virtuelle Güter

Fazit und Ausblick

Data Without Borders is back: The Internet Identity Workshop

The Internet Identity Workshop

Location Awareness / Location Apps Market